So I decided to order the Amazon Fire TV, and it arrived yesterday. (Got to love Amazon Prime for shipping!). So this is my first impressions along with why I decided to get the Fire TV. Currently I have an Apple TV second generation, which only supports up to 720p resolution and is kind of dated at this point as far as hardware. I enjoy the Apple TV and find that it’s a great product at a nice price range.

I’ve been researching Amazon Simple Workflow Services. This is a product which is like Simple Queuing Services but on steroids. It allows you to develop complex workflows that you’re able to scale out each part of the workflow as you need. There are a number of used cases on their site, one that managed to catch my eye is NASA. They are using Amazon Simple Workflow to process images captured by the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Keeping with learning more about Amazon Web Services, I wanted to build on the examples I did for SQS along with using Amazon Simple Email Service. The Simple Email Service is, as you could guess, for sending emails. It gives you sending features of a large Email Services Provider but with a low entry point. Just like lot of the other Amazon services, you pay for what you use without any contracts.

For a upcoming Ruby project that I plan on working on I want to be able to send small messages to myself with information from a form that gets filled out. Amazon has just updated Simple Notification Service to be able to send SMS messages along with emails. This fits in perfectly with what I’m looking for. Looking on Amazon’s Github page for the aws-sdk gem I didn’t see any sample code for using SNS and googling I couldn’t find any right away.